An extreme close-up of a jumping spider, staring directly at the camera while holding a dead ant. The spider is mostly fuzzy grey, with fuzzy pale brown palps, greenish black eyes, and red markings just visible on its abdomen.

I used to be very scared of spiders; nowadays I'm fine with most of them, and I actually love jumping spiders. They're just so cute. This little one (Phidippus johnsoni) checked me out while I was out doing photography the other day.

#spider #invertebrate #phidippus #macro #inaturalist #canada

genuinely think people outside of America don't realize how big this place is, how militarized and murderous our police are, how little our politicians care, how disconnected and impoverished we have been intentionally made to be, how we still have slavery just with extra steps. we really suck gang

Sounds like the best hope for the UCP to be shown the door might be the return of some form of progressive conservative party. Though I guess they banned using those words in new party names.

I wonder about this a lot. Do you think the scandals aren't getting visibility in the wider public at all (media bubbles and such)? Or do UCP supporters see them but not care? Or do they care, but they just dislike the ANDP even more so they put up with it?

TL;DR the financialization of housing has been disastrous.

I imagine there's also an important component here about how the real estate industry is an investment for things like banks, pension funds, etc. such that a drop in the cost of housing would also spook investment markets and the people who rely on those markets.

I think solving affordability means slashing the price of homes and real estate by a significant amount, but I think for that to be politically viable, we need to present an alternate retirement and social safety system that replaces what people previously relied on their home value to do for them.

Housing costs are a huge and underappreciated factor, agreed. From all I've seen the price of housing has diverged from income much more sharply than the price of food.

The political problem I see is that home values are a pillar of many people's retirement plan, or inheritance plan for their kids.

Yup. Anyone using GDP as a proxy for anything but the size of the economy is just scamming their audience, frankly. By most measures of actual outcomes (health, poverty, education, crime, etc.) Canada does distinctly better than the US.

The age-per-capita of Disney princesses is over 500 years old; sure, they're mostly under 24, but Princess Kida from Atlantis is ~8000 years old.

Strongly uneven distribution sharply reduces the value of per-capita values in judging the overall state of a group. And wealth in the US is... not even.

This planet — with all its troubles — is worth caring for.

That should be our single purpose, as a species: To be stewards of this magnificent world, ensuring it thrives long into the future.

Incredible! You do gorgeous work.

A lonely crow perched on a stump in front of a fallen log in a pine forest

A pathway through a forest with sunlight shining through the trees

A yew tree in the foreground in front an overgrown graveyard with a church in the background.

Some moss covered fallen logs in a forest

Hey #PortfolioDay
I'm Aled and I'm a UK based illustrator and storyboard artist who's recently just made the jump to freelance. Open for commission at the moment.

✉️- al98thompson@gmail.com
linktr.ee/aledthompsonart

A crow perched on a stump in a pine forest

I'm having a 20% discount on my INPRNT store for Easter weekend ✨
Special code - NYJ9UFN7

www.inprnt.com/gallery/thom...

People can and do just not vote when they find the "lesser evil" to be too uninspiring. Many people thought voters would hold their nose and vote for the Democrat in the 2024 US presidential election, and instead 3 million people stayed home and Trump won.

By allowing elites to continue to plunder the economy and society while everyone else tightens their belts, a government signals that it values its ruling class more than it values doing everything it can to protect ordinary people. That's a more than fair criticism to have.

You fixate on the "ordinary people" side to the exclusion of the "1%" side. There are limits to what any government can do to counter the effects of a global market, but allowing elites to continue record concentration of wealth during a crisis is leaving resources on the table for no good reason.

I was just thinking, I have two orange boy cats and this definitely describes one of them.

I'm now going to think of cicadas as having orange cat personalities.

(It looks like some other countries dropped more, but they're all places affected by war or warlike violence.)

Ah, okay, and the researcher later confirms those 6 countries have bigger drops than elsewhere. According to the report's full data, the UK and Ireland are down a bit less down than New Zealand.

On the latest podcast from @jordanhr.bsky.social on Canada's declining happiness, the researcher says "The decline [in happiness] has been much larger in the rest of Canada than in Québec, and globally, has been much larger in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand."

So... English speakers.

'Absolute betrayal': First Nations blast Eby in leaked transcript of DRIPA meeting A leaked transcript of a meeting between Indigenous leaders and British Columbia Premier David Eby, about his plan to suspend the province's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRI...

Hundreds of Indigenous leaders, legal groups, and labour unions have told Eby that weakening DRIPA will create more uncertainty and distrust.

Instead, he’s barreling forward with this “suspension” — yet another panicked snap-decision that will only create more instability.

This is incredibly written, and if the analysis is accurate, a chilling warning of a very bad year ahead for the world (let alone what comes later).

‘The people have spoken’: Pride flags multiply as BU students, staff protest against signage policy Boston University community members protested against BU’s administration by placing pride and other flags in windows across campus after the University removed several over spring break and later ins...

Boston University’s student paper, The Daily Free Press, reports about the multiplication of pride flags on campus following the administration’s attempted crackdown on free speech.

𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖗𝖎𝖑𝖚𝖘✦

Minnesotans seem like a cool bunch. Love this.

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

I haven't used it personally, but I've spoken to acquaintances who've used or switched to Ghost and they had good things to say about it.

The Emperor Protects: A Warhammer 40,000 Musical YouTube video by Warhammer 40,000

I'm glad there's straightforward, silly, overly-produced fun going around this April Fools' Day! Chaos is ascendant and times are stressful, but I think it's healthy to take the time to experience a little mirth on the regular.

(Also I want the full-length musical.)

Governments have given up governing. I like to lay the blame at the feet of the Chicago school of economics and the 1980s conservatives who ushered it into political dominance.